So… your justification that “folks like Anita want to use the threat of law to shut up misogynists and racists” is “she’s a feminist and feminists are bad! I know! I’ve dated some!”
You don’t have any specific examples of her wanting to use the threat of law to shut up misogynists and racists personally?
Let’s put this another way. “Folks like abdada want to rape and murder Anita just because she pointed out some continually used tropes in video games were sexist.”
After all, you’re a man, and there are certainly men who want to do that. Therefore, folks like you want to do that.
Some specific examples would help here, too, to at least be clear on what exactly you feel is so onerous. I might even agree with you on some of them. I might think you’re a tool who is using “muh freedoms” as an excuse to defend an evil system. If you’re brave enough to give examples, we might find out. If you’re just going to be vague and argue that some of them somewhere may be advocating things that are evil, well, you really haven’t said anything useful at all.
Sexism is in the game, misogyny is how the game came to be that way and how a preponderance of games marginalize women, objectifying them in-game, ignoring them as a market, and, nowadays, in the manner in which other users directly treat women online in-game & in the industry in any role.
BTW people tend to use the dictionary definition of misogyny. Start here Misogyny - Wikipedia then re-read your post or something.
I think some people have trouble dealing with the real world.
In an imaginary world, Nazis were authoritarian boors. In the real world, they orchestrated a deliberate, systematic, and industrialized slaughter of other human beings.
In an imaginary world, death is meaningful to the storyline. In the real world, death is final.
In an imaginary world, death threats are a strategy with no real world consequenses, played as idly as a trump card. In the real world, real death is involved, as is prison time.
This probably goes a little bit beyond my knowledge of how law enforcement works, but it seems like its down to the discretion of the authorities involved. But it also seems like there is a tendency to back the victim. So if personal info, especially addresses, are included it becomes credible. Not necessarily because the person making the threat with that info is likely to follow through, but because the publication of that information makes it more possible that anyone vocal or not could succeed in an attack. Especially with kids their seems to be a tendency to assume any threat is credible.
I do know that depending on the laws in a given place there can be actual legal definitions (or guidelines more like) of credibility. That only affects the ability to press charges over a given threat/harassment. It doesn’t dictate things like protective details, or moving a victim etc. So there’s this weird tension between what’s credible enough to prosecute and what’s credible enough to act on.
I don’t recall her threatening to kill anyone. Telling someone to shut the fuck up and quit being an asshole is very much covered by free speech, regardless of whether you’re right or wrong. The people subjected to that sill have the freedom to ignore it, and other people have the freedom to write them off as assholes. If you honestly don’t see a huge, night and day difference in kind rather than degree between that and threatening someone with violence, then you are honestly beyond redemption, and all I can say is fuck you.
Before you know it you won’t remember how many threads deep you are, and you’ll be on the run from the law trying to find a way back to your kids and your only chance will be to go two threads deeper in the shady sub-thread criminal underworld and you’ll be Leonardo DeCaprio. Inception. I’m referencing Inception.
This is the biggest BoingBoing discussion I’ve seen in years. I hope throwing a few facts in here doesn’t poison it.
I’m on the IT security staff at USU.
We knew there would be threats when this speaker was scheduled.
There were multiple threats. They seem independent of each other. Each had different styles and demands. Some claimed to be from local people, but they got local facts wrong. The threats didn’t seem credible to me. But, it wasn’t my ass on the line.
The campus police coordinated with the State and the Feds. There was an amazing amount of resources brought to bear in a very short period of time. The various authorities agreed the threats weren’t credible. But they prepared to act if anything happened. I was going to go over and watch the presentation. It would have been fun to watch a room full of undercover cops and feds receive a lecture on sexism.
Unfortunately Sarkeesian chose to cancel. We were all willing to risk it. Perhaps she wasn’t willing to be responsible if something went wrong.
The President of USU issued a statement. It ended with:
When our law enforcement personnel spoke about security measures, she was concerned that state law prevented the university from keeping people with legal concealed firearm permits from entering the event, and chose to cancel. As a Utah public institution, we follow state law. The Utah law provides that people who legally possess a concealed firearm permit are allowed to carry a firearm on public property, like the USU campus.
We are disappointed that students and other community members did not benefit from her presentation. While we will always prioritize the safety of our community, no threat changes Utah State University’s unwavering advocacy of academic freedom and free speech rights of everyone.
I can understand she might have felt a little skittish around people carrying guns. And the ratio of guns to people at this event would have been close to 1. We are all used to it, but we have had years.
This bit bothers me. The whole campus is public property? So anyone can roam into lectures or staff offices? If they can stop that, they can stop unauthorised people coming into a talk given by an outsider.
A lot of people seem to be waving off such threats, as if she’s somehow not supposed to be concerned by this sort of thing. As if this is just the sort of casual harassment that all women should just get used to, just endure, and stop complaining. The video games she’s most critical of, maintain exactly that sort of attitude toward personal safety, and clearly, whoever emailed that note must think this is some kind of game.
What’s most confusing to me about this Gamergate bruhaha, is the idea that there exists some kind of identity around videogaming? When did that become a thing? It’s kind of like saying that the people who watch TV are all part of a single group, who have interests and responsibilities peculiar to that happy little family. (maybe if you had to build your own TV, but seriously?)
Abortion clinic bombing seem to have been in decline, (thank you FBI for never using your anti-terror laws to defend us from that!) Now it appears that basement dwelling teenagers are willing to step up to bat.
I think this is the fallout from Sandy Hook. If ever there was a moment to make some real improvements in public safety, that was it. And some rich fuckers decided it was not to be, so the terrorists win yet again. My american dream is over, it’s time to wake up.
When one of the threats promises an École Polytechnique-style “event”, she was probably wise to cancel. It is one thing when one is the target oneself - one can then weigh the odds. When everyone else is a target…
[quote=“CaptainPedge, post:108, topic:43057”]
This bit bothers me. The whole campus is public property? So anyone can roam into lectures or staff offices? [/quote]
Yah. That is pretty much true. It helps that we are in an isolated mountain valley. So, it’s a smaller community than you would get in LA or Dallas. But, I don’t think we are all that different from other universities. I have checked in with my peers at a couple universities. The trouble is always finding IT Security’s hellhole. There are almost never any barriers to access.
Also in my experience, you can attend a USU class for a long time without being kicked out for not paying tuition. If you praise the professor, you can make it to Mid-Terms.
I understand Ms. Sarkeesian’s reluctance to speak in that venue. I wish she didn’t have to deal with the threats because she does important work. In a perfect world she would give the talk. Morris Dees talks in public, and he has had some very bad people come after him over the years, buts its also my understanding that he has a praetorian guard level executive protection team looking out for him.
I’m sure many of those who still bother see themselves as having good intentions, who protest that they are not misogynists. But the question remains why something so trivial managed to grow so big when other instances of game corruption had been greeted with a shrug. And the answer is that Zoe Quinn pressed a lot of hot buttons that have been much talked about on 4chan over the past few years: girl gamers, cheating females, using sex to get ahead, feminists and Aneeta Sarkesian’s critique of video games. So it was a perfect storm of misogynist sentiment that swept over Zoe. As part of those attacks they doxxed her, digging up more information and publishing it. Never mind that the person she slept with had never written a review of her game, anything they could find was used to bash her.
It was in this context that Adam Baldwin (yes, the actor) created the #gamergate hashtag. He claims good intentions, even though the alleged corruption was too trivial to be a scandal worthy of the suffix “-gate”. Normally I could excuse it as heat of the moment stuff, but he’s still belligerent about defending the hashtag. Nevertheless, #gamergate was used by pretty much everybody who had piled on Zoe Quinn. So it was tainted right from the beginning by misogyny and it’s pretty much hopeless to redeem it.
The “reasonable” gamergaters who do try to reclaim the hashtag still display considerable anti-SJW sentiment. It’s clear many of them lump feminists like Aneeta Sarkesian into the SJW camp, so it’s their way to tap dance around the misogynist charge. Quite frankly, their dislike of SJW galvanizes them more than corruption issues, which they hardly explore anymore. What they stand for also keeps shifting. Now they speak of combatting ”negative stereotypes of gamers in media”, i.e. whining about how media portrays #gamergate. And rather than use the word corruption they now talk of ethics in gaming journalism, and of course they consider it unethical when media ”lies” about #gamergate. So they talk big about boycotts and actually contact advertisers asking them to pull out of sites that criticizes gamergaters.
I’m not sure that there’s a lot of supporters left who care much about #gamergate anymore, and the ones who remain are too wedded to the hashtag to set up a parallel movement for anti-corruption. For that matter, by looking at what they actually spend time discussing it’s not corruption but the defense of their tribe as well as condemnation of SJW that riles them up. There’s no clear leader to get them to change course, and while Adam Baldwin might have some influence as the creator of the #gamergate hastag he’s clearly with the diehards. We’ll just have to wait until this peters out.
I think this is an important point as we’re discussing credibility of threats. It seems Sarkeesian grew up outside the U.S., not too far from where I grew up. I don’t want to hijack the thread by referring to U.S. gun control laws, but many people looking at the U.S. from the outside are simply not used to the mind-set and the reality of it all.
[quote=“abdada, post:91, topic:43057, full:true”]
Isn’t this what she’s been doing to some degree? Telling misogynists and racists to be silent?[/quote]
If you don’t grasp the vast and fundamental difference between “I don’t think you should say X” and “I will kill you if you say X,” then there’s not really anything to discuss.
This is actually reminiscent of a another fallacy that seems to be popular lately. It goes like this: “If I tell you to shut up, I’m exercising my right to free speech. If you tell me to shut up, you’re trying to prevent my right to free speech.”
Okay. None of those people are Anita Sarkeesian, though. You said that Anita Sarkeesian was trying to use the law to censor people. Please provide citations.
Not really sure why the information you provided would change the debate in any way? As far as I can tell, it’s completely consistent with the original post, just offers some interesting extra detail from an inside source. Am I missing something?
